Fight Club (1999) 3 1/2 stars out of 4. Starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter. Directed by David Fincher.
"Fight Club" is not what you perceive it to be.
It is a movie that assails your senses and lacerates your emotions with a one-two combination of visual style and barbed humor.
Basically, "Fight Club" is a savage satire, an attack on consumerism, a cry against the shallowness of our overly commercialized society. It is a look at the bleakness and emptiness that engulfs a generation which has grown up without a great war to fight or a great Depression to steel its mettle.
Ostensibly, "Fight Club" is about men who need to beat the shit out of each other in order to feel alive and make an emotional connection with another human being.
But the film, directed by David Fincher, is more complicated than that.
Fincher, the director of "Seven," leads you down a murky winding path of dark, dank cellars and alleys in which water drips incessantly and blood and sweat flow and coalesce as if choreographed by a Balanchine.
As conceived by Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls, based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, "Fight Club" is the ultimate self-help, 12-step program.
And that is where the story begins. The Narrator (Edward Norton) works for an automobile corporation as some sort of claims adjuster. He is among the walking dead, feeling nothing, unable to connect with anyone. He tries to compensate for this void by buying furniture and gizmos from catalogs.
He is an insomniac searching for some emotional release. He finds it when he begins attending meetings of various groups: testicular cancer survivors and incest victims, for example.
People listen to you when they think you're dying, the Narrator explains.
Through these encounters he gathers strength, emotional release - and free coffee.
All this changes though, when our hero meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a young man who lives by his own rules. Tyler sells soap, which he makes himself.
Circumstances throw Tyler and our Narrator together. After a night of drinking, Tyler goads his friend into hitting him. The two begin fighting and discover it an enjoyable experience. The pain and bruises are the confirmation of their humanity within the sterile confines of their commercial-driven society.
Soon the concept spreads as more and more men gather around the two.
Eventually, Tyler forms a nationwide, underground army of disgruntled men who wear their bandages and bruises as badges of honor.
"Fight Club" is not as grim as it sounds. Actually it is quite funny, but it's a sick, razor-slashing humor. You will either laugh or be sickened.
At one juncture Tyler and the Narrator make a guerrilla raid on the garbage bins at a hospital to gather the fatty remnants from liposuction operations because, as Tyler explains, human fat makes the best soap.
It is a sequence that is revoltingly hilarious.
Another moment finds the Narrator blackmailing his boss for a large severance package by beating himself up in his superior's office, all the while making it seem as if he is being beaten by his supervisor. Norton's antics are ballet-like as he flings himself around the room, slamming into tables and upending bookcases.
Pitt and Norton give splendid performances. Norton is especially fine. He again displays the talent that makes him one of the best - if not the finest - actor of his generation.
His Narrator begins the film as a dead-eyed, hollowed-cheek, zombie, an unfeeling, unflinching human being running on automatic.
As the film progresses, his character becomes more and more animated. His body language slowly changes. He becomes looser, freer, more at ease with the world.
Pitt's Tyler is a cheerful, psychotic dynamo, an urban terrorist. He is a sick and gross individual who takes pleasure in his rebellion. Working part-time as a banquet caterer, for example, he urinates into the clam chowder soup before serving it.
Pitt creates a larger-than-life outsider. It is a daring performance that is as comic as it is disturbing.
Helena Bonham Carter's character is less defined. Her only function seems to be as the third side of a triangle, to create conflict between Tyler and the Narrator. Her motivations seem hazy, her usefulness merely a plot device.
"Fight Club" is a movie you may need to see more than once to appreciate its complexity and subtlety. Its apocalyptic-style finale will stir debate.
"Fight Club" is original, mesmerizing and mind-gripping. You will walk out partially numbed and exhausted, knowing you have been through an experience that has jabbed your psyche.
Bob Bloom is the film critic at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette,IN. He can be reached by e-mail at bloom@journal-courier.com or cbloom@iquest.net
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